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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/25315357">Eve, or Arachne</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/azarias/pseuds/azarias'>azarias</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>The Silmarillion and other histories of Middle-Earth - J. R. R. Tolkien</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Dead Dove: Do Not Eat, Free Will, Gen, Infanticide, Postpartum Depression, Predestination</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-07-16</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-07-16</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-05 02:41:02</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Not Rated</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>Major Character Death</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>1,527</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/25315357</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/azarias/pseuds/azarias</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>Míriel sees her son. She sees all of her son.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>17</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>36</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>Eve, or Arachne</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Her name is Míriel þerindë, the Embroideress, the High Queen, and she is dying. This pleases her. She'll be the first to do it <em>right</em>.</p><p>All her long life she has run as fast as she can toward knowledge. To be the cleverest of a clever people, one can never slow down. Every mystery, every new thing upon the world, she has sprinted out ahead to see. If she reaches it first, she can take it apart and learn how it's made, to tell the others about it. </p><p>Now she is the greatest crafter of the Noldor: the most skilled of hand, the deepest in learning. She has woven gowns of starlight and dew. She has stitched birds into silk and bid them to sing. When she went down to the shore, she took seawater and sand and with her hands she spun them into strands of silver-gold; she braided them into rope; she knotted it into a net. When she cast the net upon the water, Ulmo rose from out the waves and roared with joy at her gift.</p><p>Yesterday she sat down at her loom and everything she wove was grey.  She reached into her box of thread and every color she pulled out was dull. She pulled them through the warp and beat them down snug together and they meant <em>nothing</em>. Lifeless, every work of her hands, not dead but never-living. Like the day before, and the day before. Like every day since the birth.</p><p>She looks across the room at him, Curufinwë, her first and only child. </p><p>He is perfect. Through his translucent infant skin she can see the fires of his spirit burn. Some of that spirit was hers once, so short a time ago, before she poured it into him. Some part of it, smaller, less fatal, more precious, is his father's. The rest of it is the child's alone. He is all of her, and greater than her. He is the last thing of worth she will ever make.</p><p>He has killed her, but he is innocent, innocent.</p><p>Other elves have died before, but no one has ever wanted to be dead. No one has grown tired of the world before Míriel. All the others have come back. She won't. The Valar will want to send her back, and she'll refuse to go. If they drag her back to her body, she'll refuse to rise. She'll lie there, waiting, and with neglect her body will fail and she'll die again. However many times it takes, she can wait as long as they can. This is another new thing she will learn to craft: the <em>end</em> of an endless life.</p><p>Her husband stands beside the window with their baby in his arms. The High King is so worried by his wife that he has left the court and followed her about like a hound these long weeks. He dangles a flower for their son to bat at. He sings a nursery song. He looks up, hopeful, when Míriel comes to him. She lays a hand across her son's forehead and closes her eyes. Unseeing, she can feel Finwë's worry still. He doesn't understand; he can't. Finwë lead their people through the perilous wilds to the promise of Valinor. Had he feared, had he doubted, all the thousands of them would have been lost. It isn't in him to know despair. He knows only that something is not as it once was.</p><p>She can feel the heat of Curufinwë, the life. It seeps into her aching knuckles and soothes away the tremors in her hand. In her nostrils is the smell of bright burning, pure flame that has no source and cannot be overcome.</p><p>"You are Fëanáro," she says, her voice a hoarse whisper but her tone firm and sure. "Fëanáro." She hears her husband's breath catch. This is the <i>amilessë apacenyë</i>, the name of foreknowledge sometimes granted to mothers. It is holy, as holy as birth itself. She cannot be wrong about it. He is her fire-spirit and she knows the truth of him.</p><p>So glad she is to be able to give her son this gift in parting.</p><p>She opens her eyes and sees her husband with worship in his eyes, looking between her and Fëanáro. She looks down, and regrets that she should ever have opened her eyes. Because she still <em>sees</em>.</p><p>The flames rise. They burn, blinding pain. They could burn forever without fuel but by choice they consume everything they touch. Greedy, restless, ever ill-content. Jealous of other light, purer light. Three bright gems in a man's hand. Three gems in a crown, in a glove, in a terrible black mountain. Wooden ships like swans dying on the water. The stink that rakes her throat is burning meat. Skin flaking to ash while the body still lives and writhes in a great wyrm's fire. Copper blood scorching on steel blades. Green lands blasted to bare rock. Eight beautiful voices raised in terrible chorus, speaking words that never should be spoken.</p><p>þerindë would weep and rage, crumpling with horror. She would stagger to her feet. Her cloak around her shoulders, the one she made herself that is proof against cold and heat, rain and wind, arrows and the sting of asps, she would climb into the high peaks where no horse would dare to carry her. She would go to the mansions of the Valar and demand they give her entry. She would spend her wrath upon their gates and if they did not yield, she would set her clever mind and hands upon the locks and take them to pieces. </p><p>þerindë the Embroideress would do all those things. Míriel, the spent, broken thing that holds the memory of þerindë, cannot find it in herself to cry.</p><p>Her son cries for her. Choking, breaking sobs, his little face squinched up tight. Finwë shifts his grip and bounces the baby on his shoulder, saying <i>sh-sh-sh</i> like his son is frightened by nothing more than the wind. All the beauty and the woe that Míriel has seen, that Fëanáro has seen just now reflected in her eyes, is outside of Finwë's world. </p><p>She should feel guilt now. It should curl in her gut and gnaw at her ribs. How can she leave her child to face this alone?</p><p>"Here," she says, holding out her hands. "He needs a nap, and so do I. I'm going to lay down in the garden and see if I can get him to settle. Send a woman for us at dinner time." </p><p>
  <i>Don't come yourself. Please don't come.</i>
</p><p>Her husband's kiss is cold on her brow. All the warmth in the world is in her arms, the little spirit screaming against her chest. She walks past the men and women of the house. They hear the baby wail, but all babies do that. His mother's there to soothe him. No one has ever chosen to die, so none of them know what death looks like on the face of a woman who is running towards it.</p><p>The air beneath the arbor is redolent with wisteria. Purple flowers, fallen from the vine, form a deep, soft bed atop the moss. New flowers bloom even as the old ones fall; this part of the garden is always summer. Míriel sits cross-legged in the midst of them, Fëanáro nestled in the cradle of her skirts. She takes the pins from her silver hair and looses it to fall around the two of them like a blanket. </p><p>She looks at the pins in her hand. Is time like that, like a knot of hair? Like a pattern on a loom? Can she look into that terrible future and trace its threads back and back, unpick the knots and change the weave? Even now there is no fabric outside her ken, she who was þerindë. </p><p>She looks down at her crying child and sees only the fire and the shadow, the rock black beneath a burning body, the wings of living darkness overhead. And the screaming. She hears a million mouths; it lasts a thousand years. They curse the House of Finwë. They curse the womb of Míriel. She cannot find an end of thread, a cord to cut, a place to put right the pattern. It's tangled and her hands are shaking. </p><p>The birds in the garden begin to curse. They shriek and fly about. They sing warnings of predators who do not hunt in Tirion. </p><p>Míriel presses her deft fingers into the arteries that run along her son's small throat. He cries, louder, but only for a moment. He closes his eyes. He takes a breath and lets it out, and his body breathes in again, but he is asleep and past sleep. She is strong, but it takes so little strength to reach beneath his head and crush the soft bones in his neck. His breathing stops. </p><p>There is a thunder in the cloudless sky. Míriel curls herself around the limp body that once held her son. She doesn't close her eyes. She simply steps outside her body, and runs, and runs, into the darkening grey.</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>I have no idea what happens now.</p></blockquote></div></div>
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